Christoph Eschenbach returns

When Riccardo Muti left Philadelphia in 1992, it was with the promise of frequent return to an orchestra dismayed to see him depart. In subsequent years, Muti's repeated cancellations of scheduled appearances became something of a joke, although a painful one to city fathers.

(No doubt there was a sigh of relief in certain quarters when the mercurial maestro jilted the New York Philharmonic too, thereby depriving the Big Apple of a decade of Giuseppe Martucci.)

Christoph Eschenbach's departure from Philadelphia at the end of the 2008 season was another matter. Eschenbach lacked Muti's panache, but he was a good citizen in discharging the music director's role as public emissary and patient cultivator of rich patrons.

He made generally good music too, although not to the satisfaction of at least one local critic and, more to the point, at least some of the musicians he led. From my corner, he got a raw deal, but he handled it with impeccable class.

Had he simply left town and put the experience behind him, no one would have expected more. But Eschenbach's quiet pride, and at least some of the friendships he made in Philadelphia, didn't permit that. So it was that he returned this past week to conduct his old orchestra in three concerts— each featuring a big symphonic warhorse (the Prokofiev Fifth, the Bruckner Sixth, the Schubert Ninth)— and the Curtis Symphony as well.

The wreckage of Barber's career

The Curtis concert bracketed Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto between two French works: Henri Dutilleux's Metaboles and the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. The Barber may have had some resonance for Eschenbach beyond its musical values, or the interest of its Curtis faculty soloist, Meng-Chieh Liu, in the score. Barber composed the concerto as part of Lincoln Center's inaugural festivities in 1962. Characteristically, he took his time about it, adapting a recently completed elegy for flute and piano to serve as the slow movement (which it does very well), and he rushed at the end to meet his deadline.

The audience liked the piece, but critics, a little embarrassed by its accessibility, were dismissive (wasn't a dedication piece for a great new venue in the world's cultural capital supposed to put people off?). And when Franco Zeffirelli's overblown production of Barber's Antony and Cleopatra six years later proved an outright disaster, the composer's career was to all intents and purposes over.

Barber, of course, prevailed in the long run. Whether Paul Horsley is correct to say in his program notes that Barber's Piano Concerto is the best by an American since the Edward MacDowell Second is open to question— partisans of Gershwin, not to say Milton Babbitt, may feel otherwise— but it is, despite an opening movement that overstays its welcome a bit, an attractive and in some places pungent work.

Barber couldn't keep his orchestra from singing, but the piano part, played with assurance and bravura by Mr. Liu, is spiky and percussive. When one considers that the Barber Violin Concerto remains far and away the most popular American concerto for the instrument, and that his Cello Concerto lags only behind it (though at some distance) in popularity, Barber arguably hit the trifecta with his concertos for the major solo instruments, and that is no small success.

12 minutes too long

Dutilleux's Metaboles, from 1964, is very much a work of the '60s, with a great deal of skittering passagework and jabbing punctuation. Stravinsky and Messaien are the presiding deities in this score, but Dutilleux has enough of a profile to give the music interest, and the Curtis orchestra played the work with precision and dash.

The Symphonie fantastique was another matter, however. Eschenbach's timings are always on the long side, and this 45-minute score lasted 57 under his baton. This isn't a matter of dragging tempos, but of an expressive largesse that works better for some pieces than others. In the Symphonie fantastique, it does not. This work, the true cornerstone of the Romantic literature, is unclassifiable— not a symphony by any classical standard, but not a suite nor (despite the programmatic titles of its five movements) a series of tone poems either. Berlioz himself came close enough to a description by subtitling it "Episodes from the Life of an Artist."

By any name, Symphonie fantastique is an astonishing waterfall of ideas and new sonorities, couched in an idiom that has defined French musical language to the present day. Making it a unified musical experience requires a tight hand rather than an indulgent one, though, and while Eschenbach's reading brought out a wealth of fascinating detail, it did not, for this listener, finally cohere.

That whooping Curtis audience

The Curtis players again acquitted themselves very well, and the string playing in particular showed the next generation of the Philadelphia sound in the making. Curtis audiences are always generous in their enthusiasm; this one punctuated each movement of the Barber concerto with applause, and the delighted whoops and hollers that greeted the Symphonie fantastique contrasted agreeably to the staid behavior of regular symphony audiences.

The Philadelphia Orchestra concert that featured the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos in the Bartok Second Violin Concerto (1938) and the Bruckner Sixth was, however, greeted by standing ovations for each half of the program. Bartok's concerto stood alone for a long time, as an earlier and quite lovely one was not discovered until years after his death. The big Second was, in the mid-century decades, the 20th-century fiddle concerto until the Shostakovich First Concerto (itself a suppressed work) nudged it off the stage. Coming in the middle of a remarkable creative spurt that saw, within a three-year period, the production of the Music for String, Percussion, and Celesta, the Sonata for two Pianos and Percussion, the Contrasts for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano, the Divertimento for Strings, and the Sixth String Quartet, it's a robust work with inventive sonorities (the celesta again) and a characteristic Hungarian tang.

What impresses at this distance, however, is the Second Concerto's lyric sweetness; some passages in the middle movement could have come out of the Barber Violin Concerto, or nearly so. Kavakos does not have the biggest tone (although he's at all odds the tallest violin soloist I've ever seen), but he's a sterling technician with impeccable musicianship, and he navigated his demanding part with expressiveness and aplomb. Eschenbach supported him ably.

Bruckner: In a class by himself

As for Bruckner, that heavy-winged angel, you take him or leave him, for he's like no other symphonist. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick accused Bruckner of trying to force Wagner into sonata form, a remark that has some justice; but Bruckner is really his own man— a rhapsodist in symphonic form, whose ideas surge, tumble and interweave in colossal sonic blocks that abruptly rise and fall. His symphonies are perhaps best compared to Strauss' tone poems, but Strauss is far more classical in his sense of form; structurally, Bruckner anticipates Stravinsky, although their musical sensibilities could hardly be more alien to each other.

The Bruckner Sixth is relatively neglected, though the wealth of its ideas is remarkable. But Eschenbach, who conducted it here just a year ago, seems to have made it a specialty. Eschenbach can be tight and pointillistic, as he showed in the Dutilleux Metaboles, but he clearly relishes Bruckner's unruliness, and he kept the Orchestra along for the hour-long ride. I think he relished the standing ovation too, although he was more restrained in accepting it than he was with the Curtis Symphony audience, for whom he spread his arms wide. If he was trying to suggest what Philadelphia has lost with his departure, he mostly made his case.



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